[ANN] FFI Tutorial, Pharo5 / Libclang

hi all,

Just announcing that I'm writing a series of posts on using FFI in
Pharo 5 to interface to libclang, the interface library for the LLVM C
compiler.

http://blog.openinworld.com/2016/09/pharo-libclang-ffi-part-1-preamble/

I'm writing this from the perspective of a FFI newbie progressively
learning the system.  I've left in a few mis-steps since I think it
can be useful seeing what didn't work.

cheers -ben

Hi,

I'm quite interested in this, though not in UFFI bit, rather
in bindings as such. 

What is the goal of the project? 

Thanks! 

Best, Jan



On Sun, 2016-09-25 at 01:25 +0800, Ben Coman wrote:

The immediate driver is that I want to parse the VM platform sources
and use Roassal to arrange them graphically to look for cross-platform
patterns. I started doing this manually but its a error prone and
tedious.
http://forum.world.st/code-chart-of-time-inside-the-VM-td4916951.html

I am replicating a bit the TalkFFI project [1]
which provides Pharo 4 NativeBoost bindings to libclang
but that needs to be ported to Pharo 5 UFFI and a secondary goal was
for me to learn about FFI, so I'm proceeding from scratch.  What I
learn will help in porting TalkFFI to Pharo 5.

[1] http://smalltalkhub.com/#!/~CipT/TalkFFI

In the back of my mind I consider a possibility of storing C code
in-Image, and calling out to libclang to compile it, dynamically l ink
and run it without ever leaving Pharo.  Or imagine for the VM when
saving a modified Slang primitive it generated the C code just for
that primitive, via FFI got libclang to compile and link it to the
platform library, then started off the new VM running tests all in one
go.    But thats a pie in the sky idea probably a long way off.

cheers -ben


On Sun, Sep 25, 2016 at 4:56 AM, Jan Vrany <[hidden email]> wrote:

this is super good… thanks for doing this.
once finished I would like to use it as tutorial reference :)

cheers,
Esteban